It's Never Hard As It Looks

Top Ten Tuesday – Books That Don’t Stand the Test of Time

It’s Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme hosted by the broke and the bookish. Each week, there’s a different topic. Come up with your list of top ten, post it, and then add to the link at b&b’s masterpost, then bounce around and see other people’s lists.

This week’s theme was Top Ten Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed. Despite this post’s official title, not all of them are negative, I promise.

1. The Elenium by David (and Leigh) Eddings. One of the first ‘adult’ fantasy series I read (yes, I read this before the Belgariad thanks to a classmate loaning this trilogy to me), I thoroughly enjoyed it and even went out to buy all of the fantasy books the Eddings had written. Several years later, however, I realized that all of their books were very tropey, very predictable, and that they used archetypes in place of characters. I still appreciate what they did for the fantasy genre and I recommend them highly as ‘gateway drugs’ into the realms of fantasy and sci-fi, but I’ve moved beyond them.

2. Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. The first time I read this book, I was confused, uncertain, and wondering if I wanted to continue the series. I did, reading the second book and buying the third, but then I walked away, disenchanted and frustrated. Several years later, I saw that more books had been published, and they looked and sounded interesting. So I went back to Gardens of the Moon and tried reading the whole series all over again. And I am so glad I did so because The Malazan Book of the Fallen is now one of my all-time favorite series.

3. The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny. My first time through the ten books of Amber, I only made it through the first five before giving up in disgust, declaring that the series was awful and I didn’t want anything more to do with it. This time, it only took me a few months before I reread the first five and proceeded onto the next ten. It’s not that I’m blind to it’s faults now – real or perceived – but I have come to like Amber and to be one of those who bemoans the fact that we will never know where exactly Zelazny was heading with it.

4. The Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne (and Todd) McCaffrey. My feelings about this series are so confused these days. I loved it when I first read it, back around the time I first read the Elenium, among other books. These days, I’m just not sure. Some of them I still love, others I waffle on, and still others I don’t particularly want to reread ever.

….And that’s all I managed to come up with. I’m kind of stubborn about books and don’t tend to change my mind, I suppose. Then, too, just because I love a book doesn’t mean I’m blind to its faults, and those faults don’t always make me change my mind later. Hope I didn’t whack anyone’s favorite (too hard).